Ancient Egyptian jewellers made wire by pulling metal strips through stone beads
Long before anyone drew wire through a steel die, Egyptian craftsmen of the 2nd Dynasty, nearly 5,000 years ago, cut strips from metal sheet and tugged them through holes in stone beads. The strips curled around themselves into slim tubes, fine enough for the chains and ornaments of royal jewellery.
Wire is simply a flexible, rounded rod of metal, usually made by pulling it through a hole in a die or draw plate, and sized by gauge number or cross-sectional area. It carries loads when twisted into wire rope, and carries signals and power as electrical cable, either a single solid core or many strands braided together. Not all wire is round: square, hexagonal and flat versions exist for decoration or for jobs such as efficient loudspeaker voice coils, and the Slinky toy is wound from flattened wire.
Ancient goldsmiths found several routes. From around the middle of the second millennium BCE, most gold wire in jewellery shows seams spiralling along its length, the mark of twisted strips later rolled round between flat surfaces. Square and hexagonal wire was likely swaged, hammered between grooved blocks, a technique perhaps dating to early second-millennium Egypt and used in Bronze and Iron Age Europe for neck rings and brooches; early Etruscan filigree is full of twisted square wire. Beaded wire, made by deforming round wire, appeared around Italy and the Levant during the 600s BCE, perhaps spread by the Phoenicians, until simpler twisted ropes of drawn wire replaced it around the tenth century CE.
Drawing through dies displaced strip twisting in the Old World between roughly the 8th and 10th centuries AD. In England, wire was drawn from the medieval period for wool cards and pins, whose import Edward IV banned in 1463. Britain's first wire mill opened at Tintern around 1568, run by a company holding a monopoly, yet the finest sizes were still drawn by hand.
Modern practice passes wire through a sequence of ever smaller dies. Hard steel or cast iron serves for ordinary work, while diamond or ruby dies are used for fine wire because they keep their exact size far longer. Between passes the wire may be annealed, heated to soften it, so it can be drawn further or made as ductile and conductive as possible.
Source: Wire
